The media are reporting stories with a new theme: More CO2 is bad for plant life. This flies in the face of biochemistry, but the activist motivation is clear: They want people thinking CO2 is bad in every way. They don’t want the warming scare undermined by the idea that CO2 along with warming actually helps plant life and agriculture.

The current stories are coming from researchers involved with an outdoor laboratory site called Jasper Ridge, affiliated with Stanford University, my alma mater and home to famous alarmist Stephen Schneider (deceased). The headlines are occasioned by a new paper appearing Sept. 5 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, authored by Chris Field, director of the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment..

Headlines Claim, Details Deny

Headlines and claims like those below are appearing this week, but as we shall see, the details do not support the conclusions…

James Delingpole, British writer, rants regularly at Breitbart about the utter goofiness of the world’s climate true believers. He wrote today about a climate “science” scam that keeps on rearing its ugly head, in spite of being debunked thoroughly over and over.

Aside from the need to debunk once more, it’s a classic example of the workings of climate science. In this case, one of Delingpole’s articles was supposedly debunked in The Marine Biologist(the magazine of the marine biologist community). He wrote:

There was a time when I would have just ignored it: the guy who wrote it – one Phil Williamson – is the embodiment of Upton Sinclair’s dictum that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Not only is Williamson based at the “University” of East Anglia – aka Climate Alarmism Central, heavily featured in the Climategate scandal…

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Ron Clutz features Dr Murry Salby’s new textbook ‘Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate’ which calls into question the narrow-minded thinking behind claims that carbon dioxide is a powerful climate driver, to the virtual exclusion of other factors.

“Fearless Felix” Baumgartner ascended to the stratosphere and stepped into the void from 24.2 miles above the Earth. His speed during the fall reached Mach 1.24, and the Austrian adventurer nailed the landing. October 14, 2012 Wired

Introduction
Murry Salby is also totally committed to the atmosphere. He is a scientist with such deep and broad knowledge of atmospheric physics that he has written multiple textbooks on the subject. And yet he is not fearful for the future of our climate system, in contrast to many of his colleagues. By stepping away from “consensus” climate alarms, he has shown unusual courage by speaking plainly about the atmosphere and climate, despite attempts to silence him.

Dr. Salby’s latest textbook is entitled Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate (here). I got a copy and have been reading in it to understand where he comes down on various issues related to climate…

Somebody seems to have re-discovered the carbon cycle, and true to form the BBC is keen to spread the word by trying to relate it to buses and jumbo jets.

The seas around the UK and the rest of northern Europe take up a staggering 24 million tonnes of carbon each year. It is a mass equivalent to two million double-decker buses or 72,000 747 jets. The number was produced by scientists studying the movement of carbon dioxide into and out of the oceans.(more…)

The first commercial scale plant capturing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will be built in Switzerland, with the greenhouse gas to be used to improve growth of vegetables, reports E & T Magazine.

Of course…greenhouse gas…

The plant will be operated by Zurich-based Climeworks, a spin-off company from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich), and uses so-called Direct Air Capture (DAC) technology, which relies on a novel filter to extract carbon dioxide from the ambient air.

The gas binds to the surface of the reusable filter. When the filter is filled to its capacity, it is heated to 100°C to release the CO2, which will be used in a nearby greenhouse to enhance vegetable growth.

This may sound like a joke but it seems not – it’s all over the usual blogs and sceptic media. Does it put a spanner in the works? This from The Register’s report:

As world leaders get ready to head to Paris for the latest pact on cutting CO2 emissions, it has emerged that there isn’t as much urgency about the matter as had been thought.

A team of top-level atmospheric chemistry boffins from France and Germany say they have identified a new process by which vast amounts of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are emitted into the atmosphere from the sea – a process which was unknown until now, meaning that existing climate models do not take account of it.

Clive Crook at Bloomberg says there are several scandals linked to the VW diesel debacle. Here we’ll focus on one of them, related to so-called climate policies. Was the ‘dash for diesel’ ever a rational policy?

A third scandal, even more costly than the first two, also needs to be noticed and examined. It concerns the economic and environmental policies that first set European car manufacturers and consumers on course to this pile-up.

Remember that “clean diesel” was a government-led initiative, brought to you courtesy of Europe’s taxpayers. And, by the way, the policy had proved a massively expensive failure on its own terms even before the VW scandal broke.

Basically, Betts ran away. He’s a natural climate change denier. His job is to ‘do outreach’ promoting the Carbon Dioxide causes climate change hypothesis, but maintain plausible deniability that anyone ever showed him what a crock of crap it is compared to more likely explanations.

They are panicking! Some climate people have bet the farm on a dangerously warming earth, and the need to instantly switch to clean natural energy so we aren’t polluting the world by burning nasty coal and using nasty gasoline and creating the CO2 in the atmosphere that is causing all the trouble. It’s our fault.

But we are promised a colder winter, the claims of a lack of sea ice in the Arctic and Antarctic are disproved by satellite photography. There’s millions and millions of subsidies and grants building wind farms and solar arrays, and they are still not producing much energy at all.

The science of global warming is so settled that 20 climate scientists have written to President Obama to ask him to prosecute the people who “have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change.”

Cato at Liberty reports from the US on the myth of carbon dioxide as ‘carbon pollution’, when in fact it’s essential to life on Earth. What we really have is state-sponsored mind pollution.

The Spin Cycle is a reoccurring feature based upon just how much the latest weather or climate story, policy pronouncement, or simply poo-bah blather spins the truth. Statements are given a rating between 1-5 spin cycles, with less cycles meaning less spin.

President Obama is keen on calling carbon dioxide emitted from our nation’s fossil fuel-powered energy production, “carbon pollution.” For example, last week, when introducing EPA’s Clean Power Plan—new regulations limiting carbon dioxide emissions from the power plants that currently produce 67 percent of the country’s electricity—he used the term “carbon pollution” ten times. For example:

This posting just points to a very well done page that calculates the relative contributions to the greenhouse effect as used by the AGW thesis, by various gasses. In particular, it includes water vapor. The result is a conclusion that human caused CO2 is not relevant to global temperature. Something I have said before, but without the nice graphs and calculations.

It is about 0.28%, if water vapor is taken into account– about 5.53%, if not.

This point is so crucial to the debate over global warming that how water vapor is or isn’t factored into an analysis of Earth’s greenhouse gases makes the difference between describing a significant human contribution to the greenhouse effect, or a negligible one.

One of the ‘Tablets of Stone’ in the argument for ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’ is that human emission of co2 through the burning of fossil fuel is responsible for the increase in the atmospheric level of this trace gas since pre-industrial times, which now constitutes 0.039% of Earth’s atmosphere. It is claimed that this can be logically deduced and calculated and there is no doubt we are the guilty species.

Roy Clark phd has spent the last three years researching and writing this paper. It confirms my own research on the average sunspot number and the ocean equilibrium value, as well as extending my thoughts on the multi-decadal retention of heat energy in the worlds oceans into properly quantified analysis. This has enabled Roy to make much more detailed and definite statements about the relative importance of co2 in the atmosphere as an agent of climate change than I could. The paper is pay for, but at least the journal (Energy and Environment) has been consistently open minded about reviewing and publishing those scientists whose research findings are sometimes at odds with the so called mainstream consensus on this issue. The paper runs to 30 pages with many graphs and digrams and represents much better value and more bang for your buck than any other published paper on the subject I know of. A version of the CA climate article should be published on the SSPI (Science and Public Policy Institute) website quite soon and I will revisit this paper after that has gone online.

Energy transfer at the Earth’s surface is examined from first principles. The effects on surface temperature of small changes in the solar constant caused by the sunspot cycle and small increases in downward long wave infrared (LWIR) flux due to a 100 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration are considered in detail. The changes in the solar constant are sufficient to change ocean temperatures and alter the Earth’s climate.

Figure 4

The surface temperature changes produced by an increase in downward LWIR flux are too small to be measured and cannot cause climate change. The assumptions underlying the use of radiative forcing in climate models are shown to be invalid. A null hypothesis for CO2 is proposed that it is impossible to show that changes in CO2 concentration have caused any climate change, at least since the current composition of the atmosphere was set by ocean photosynthesis about one billion years ago.